2014, a somewhat tardy wrap-up

Yes, 2014. I know that feels like years ago now. 

source

Total: 181. This sounds fantastic until you realise 56 were 'Nancy Drew' books and 88 were re-reads. And 1 (one) was just a tiny little essay. Then again, those 56 books were a brilliant and nostalgic journey back into my past as a reader; and those 88 re-reads have made me the placidly sane (lazy) person I am today. That makes 93 new-to-me books (some of those Nancy Drew books had not been read before, just to confuse things). The 1 essay was written by an adult for adults, and I think I need that statistic. ;-)

How did I read them? 165 e-books to 16 tree-books. 

This preference has not stopped me buying real books - I just haven't read them.

female writers: 93

male writers: 32

ghost-writers: 56, predominantly female

number of writers I had to google to sex: 2

non-fiction: 6. Terrible. TERRIBLE.

crime/mystery/espionage: 122. 

In its own way, also terrible. But so enjoyable.

And the hits (and misses)?

  

Favourite non re-read (fiction):

The Golden Child - Penelope Fitzgerald (I actually reviewed this one)

Favourite non re-read (non-fiction):

Love Lessons: A Wartime Journal - Joan Wyndham 

Wonderful diary of a very silly and selfish young woman in WW2 who nevertheless manages to capture a remarkable moment in London life among the bohemians during the Blitz. 

Favourite re-read:

Death in Kashmir - M. M. Kaye

An old favourite. In the dying days of the Raj, something sinister is afoot in beautiful Kashmir. Can innocent (and pretty) Miss Parrish decipher the clues or will she too perish in mysterious circumstances? And who is that handsome polo-playing aide-de-camp...? Perfect escapism. 

  

New-to-me book most likely to be re-read:

Parnassus on Wheels - Christopher Morley. What could one love more than a bookshop in a caravan? Despite my profound devotion to indoor plumbing, this book was gorgeous - see a work in progress' review. The sequel, sadly, was a bit of a letdown. 

Favourite new-to-me author:

Mrs. Georgie Sheldon. Ah, how much do I love you, Mrs. G.S. Er, except for that one I did not finish (a first for me!) on Christian Scientists. But, apart from that hiccup, if you're looking for an old-fashioned serial type semi-sensationalist romantic novel featuring innocent young women, worthy young men, mistaken identities, presumed deaths, sudden poverty, incredible wealth, loads of travel, and some really silly plots, then she is for you. Thanks to fleur in her world for starting me off on these with Mona, or The Secret of a Royal Mirror and True Love's Reward: A Sequel to Mona. Just be careful that you (unlike me) start one where Part 2 is actually still in print... I read: The Heatherford Fortune; His Heart's Queen; Geoffrey's Victory, or The Double Deception; Virgie's Inheritance; Threads Gathered Up; The Masked Bridal.

  

Most satisfactory most-hyped book:

Eleanor & Park - Rainbow Rowell. God, wasn't it horrible being a teenager? I miss the 80s too. Anyone want to make me a mix-tape? 

Least satisfactory most-hyped book:

Beautiful Ruins - Jess Walter. This book should have made me so happy - Italy, the dolce vita, etc. - but I just felt manipulated. Also messing with real people makes me uneasy.

  

Worst title: 

Dumps: A Plain Girl - L. T. Meade. There's nothing that education and regular meals won't fix, however. 

Best double-entendre:

Biggles Takes it Rough - Capt. W.E. Johns

  

Book most likely to make me never pick up the author's works again:

Tono-Bungay - H. G. Wells. Should have worked - patent medicine, upstairs-downstairs relationships, early experiments in flight - but so tedious. I have few Socialist tendencies, I'm afraid.

Book most likely to be thrown across the room:

The Whole Fromage: Adventures in the Delectable World of French Cheese - Kathe Lison. I love cheese. I love France. I do not like entirely gratuitous descriptions of what people look like, as though this is a Dan Brown book. So, she's a bit wrinkly? Who CARES? She can make cheese so good it'd make statues swoon. This book also fits into another non-fiction pet hate category of mine, namely 'authors who insert themselves into narratives about other far more interesting people and subjects'.

    

Craziest plot:

The Second Wife - Irving Wallace. Loved this - insane espionage plot and some really bad sex. I miss the Cold War. Recommended by clothes in books. 

Book producing weird feeling of déjà vu despite having never read it before:

In a Glass, Darkly - Helen McCloy. Eventually I tracked this feeling down to having read the plot of this book in its earlier incarnation as a short story in Maureen Daly's My Favourite Mystery Stories, a book we keep in the loo.

Most memorable appearance by a cat:

Rogue Male - Geoffrey Household. Proper spy novel with lots of lying in dirty holes being manly. Also, a cat. 

Number of deaths from consumption/TB:

I think only one, and that was "quick consumption", best friend of the plot-driven Victorian author. Thus, The Masked Bridal (1894): "...Edith was informed that Gerald Goddard had died only the week previous of quick consumption, and his body had been quietly interred in Greenwood, according to his own instructions."

  

Most rape-y:

Sabre-Tooth [Modesty Blaise 2] - Peter O'Donnell. I liked the first one (Modesty Blaise) a lot - strong female character, lots of silly gadgets and madcap plots. The second was a bit grim.

Don't read if you're alone and the electricity supply isn't certain:

Some Must Watch - Ethel Lina White. This was also a fantastically creepy B&W film called The Spiral Staircase (1945). Then again, what do you think will happen if you take a job as a lady's companion in the middle of nowhere?

 

Most gratuitous use of a robot as a plot device:

The Crooked Banister [Nancy Drew] - 'Carolyn Keene'. I'm sure whoever ghost-wrote this one had been getting their inspiration from magic mushrooms. 

A characters who can play the bag-pipes? 

Nancy, of course: The Clue of the Whistling Bagpipes - 'Carolyn Keene'.

    

A nice young man:

T. Tembarom - Frances Hodgson Burnett. Lovely, lovely read - innocent young American Mr Tembarom wreaks havoc on the aristocracy when he inherits a stately estate in conservative old England. 

Book most likely to make me look intelligent if read on a bus:

Pnin - Vladimir Nabokov. A rather wonderful take on the academic novel. Poor Pnin - nothing ever goes right. This is my second Nabokov (after Lolita), and certainly not my last.

Best sensationalist novel:

Her Father's Name - Florence Marryat. I reviewed this one. Cross-dressing! Heaving bosoms! Ladies smoking cigars! 

Book providing the solution to the burning question of what sort of pie Mr Drew likes best?

In no. 29 (Mystery at the Ski Jump) it is "Apple with lots of cinnamon". In no. 56 (The Thirteenth Pearl) it is lemon meringue pie. I think we can agree that this inconsistency is an instance of shocking editorial oversight.

So, roll on 2015. And, somewhat belatedly, Happy New Year!

{review} berlin

Pierre Frei Berlin (2003 [German]; tr. 2006)

Berlin is a high quality crime novel, which I'd recommend if you like historical crime fiction set in Germany (post-war in this case, unlike so many of the similar efforts around which riff on the 1930s).

It had been like that the first time, and it was the same whenever his craving grew too strong and there was only one way to satisy it: with a young, blonde, blue-eyed woman and a cattle chain.

Yes, Berlin is another serial-killer novel, but is raised above the usual beautiful-woman-hacked-to-death-with-nasty-sexual-angle by detailed characterisation of the characters and their settings. This is a book where you can smell and feel the brutalised post-war city. It is jammed packed full of details about the workings of the occupied city as the Germans and Americans attempt to liaise about what may or not be a serial killing crime-wave imported straight from the States with the military occupiers.

This could have been a very ordinary book, given the basic serial killer premise (indeed, if you know any German, the killer's identity doesn't take long to figure out). But what worked really well for me in this - very long - book was how Frei took one victim at a time and transported the reader back in time to the character's early life (and a nice chunk of 1930s' Germany as well) and her journey towards that moment when her path crossed with that of the killer. The victims come (um, briefly) alive in these biographies and it is a really effective means of ensuring that the apparent randomness of their murders evokes our full sympathy for rich lives cut brutally short. This is classy historical crime fiction.

There are many other threads which stitch this book together: the life of the German detective who has to figure out what is going on; the life of the American liaison officer as he falls for - you guessed it - a potential victim; and a quirky little strand about the the life of the son of the detective which should really be quite extraneous to the narrative but which manages both to add depth to the depiction of the city and to stitch up the plot. Incidentally, this youth is exactly the same age that Frei would have been in Berlin in 1945.  

A small[type] warning: Berlin is a big book and the writing is very, very small in the Atlantic Books paperback (2006). The font is hideously narrow. It was painful to read. Maybe this explains proof-reading slips such as would/wound, acused, fourth/forth.

Rating: not the most original of crimes, but the settings and characters push it to the next level. 7/10.

If you liked this... I am very sentimental about M. M. Kaye's Death in Berlin (1955) - a rather gentle post-war Berlin detective novel/romance.

{review} philip kerr: sero sed serio?

Philip Kerr The One From The Other (2006)

Philip Kerr's detective novels featuring Bernie Gunther are so far superior to almost any other historical crime fiction that I hesitate even to categorise him within that genre. Kerr has perfectly captured an historical period (Germany in the 1930s and 1940s) and has created a protagonist of such quality that he must surely be the new Philip Marlowe:

The house was about a five-minute drive west of the station. A brass plaque on one of the obelisk-shaped gateposts said it was a villa, but probably only because they were a little shy about using a word like 'palace'. It took me a whole minute to climb the steps to the front door, where a fellow dressed to go cheek-to-cheek with Ginger Rogers was waiting to take my hat and act as my scout across the marble plains that lay ahead. He stayed with me as far as the library, then wheeled around silently and set off for home again before it started to get dark.

I first read Kerr's loose trilogy - March Violets (1989), The Pale Criminal (1990), A German Requiem (1991); published in an omnibus as Berlin Noir (1993) - a few years ago and was disappointed that there were no others in the series. Fortunately, The One From The Other (2006) marked Bernie Gunther's return and has now been joined by A Quiet Flame (2008), If the Dead Rise Not (2009) and Field Grey (forthcoming 2010).

Kerr has a mastery of the gritty details of the 1930s and 40s. Gunther's world is totally believable. There are so many little details which ring true: colours, smells, uncomfortable sensations, etc.:

He smelled faintly of cologne and hypocrisy.

In the half darkness and close confines of the confessional his voice sounded particularly infernal. He probably laid it on a greased rack and left it to smoke over a hickory-wood fire when he went to bed at night.

...I turned to face a man wearing a neat, grey suit with a wing collar that looked as if it had been tailored by Pythagoras.

Kerr also has the ability to shock the reader, as in his account of Dachau, for instance, or in his introduction of real historical figures into the narrative - Eichmann and Heydrich among others. And his stories are tight. I'm quite interested in 'coincidence' - so many crime novels depend on coincidence to tie up the ends neatly. A cross-over book like William Boyd's Ordinary Thunderstorms, for example, plays with coincidence in an overt manner; it asks us to think about coincidence. Coincidence is also extraordinarily important in The One From The Other, but it is handled so subtlety that it is only towards the close to the book that its significance becomes obvious. Anyway, I mustn't rave on, but these books are extraordinarily well-researched and written. I'm still getting over "preemptive triage" as a euphemism for euthanasia. The sardonic voice of the narrator, the disillusioned detective with a conscience who hides his education under a tough guy façade, is spot-on:

Beneath all this decorative nonsense was an inscription. It read 'Sero sed serio', which was Latin for 'We're richer than you are'.

Amusingly, this is the motto of the Kerr family ("Late, but in earnest") - completely appropriate for someone who leaves a series untouched for fifteen years, then turns in a Meisterwerk.

  

I read The One From The Other between two historical accounts of Berlin at the end of World War II - Until the Final Hour: Hitler's Last Secretary by Traudl Junge (with Melissa Müller) and the shocking, anonymous A Woman in Berlin. Kerr's grasp of the period is so good that he segues in between these 'real' histories almost seamlessly:

I beckoned the waiter towards me. He had Hindenburg's moustache, Hitler's blue eyes, and Adenauer's personality. It was like being served by fifty years of German history.

Typo! p.254 (you're for your).

Rating: 10/10.

If you liked this...: I enjoyed the first book in David Downing's WW2 series, Zoo Station (2007). Another more fluffy, but very well written and enjoyable post-war Berlin detective story is M. M. Kaye's Death in Berlin (1955).